In recent years, many policies have been formulated and strongly promoted to improve the quality of early childhood education. In 2012, the Taiwanese government enacted a new national curriculum framework for early childhood education to enhance the quality of early childhood education programs. This new framework is key competence-oriented,…

UNESCO's Education for Sustainable Development Roadmap highlights the need to transform learning environments by integrating the 17 Sustainable Development Goals from United Nations Agenda 2030. This presents challenges for early childhood education in establishing a trajectory to transform the way young children see the world and themselves.…

Early care and education (ECE) programs for children prior to kindergarten in California are provided through a mixed delivery system that includes licensed home- and center-based programs as well as school settings. The requirements, experience, and supports for educators vary widely across settings, depending more on funding sources and…

Cheating is a common human behavior but few studies have examined its emergence during early childhood. In three preregistered studies, a challenging math test was administered to 5- to 6-year-old children (total N = 500; 255 girls). An answer key was present as children completed the test, but they were instructed to not peek at it. In Study 1,…

Research shows that high-quality pre-K can have lasting impacts on children's learning and development, with the largest effects clustered among children of color, multilin­gual learners, and children experiencing poverty. Yet policymakers, administrators, and teachers often wrestle with the complexities of providing these programs on a large…

Environmental modifications to the block area are important to promote children's early spatial learning experiences. It is not enough just to include block materials in the classroom. Sarama and Clements (2009) have proposed that children's free play with novel math-related activities rarely facilitates the intended educational concepts without…

The Delhi government in India recently launched its preschool curriculum for the city's 10,897 communitybased preschool centers. The draft National Education Policy of India, made public in June 2019, dedicates its first chapter to the importance of early childhood care and education and the need to extend the right to education to every child who…

Historians such as Seth Koven and Carolyn Steedman have shown how visual and literary depictions of children helped move late-nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class audiences to join in child-saving philanthropy aimed at the deserving poor. This essay focuses on an analysis of the promotional literature of the free kindergartens. Starting from…

Head Start, the federal program that provides preschool education, health, and social services for children from poor families, is one of the United States' most popular government programs. Created in 1965, it has endured as a symbol of commitment to children, serving just fewer than one million children a year in neighborhood sites across the…

Now in a completely revised and updated third edition, this widely adopted casebook and text presents effective, creative approaches to helping children who have experienced such stressful situations as parental death or divorce, abuse and neglect, violence in the school or community, and natural disasters. While the book retains the focus on…

Maria Montessori believed that preschool children were capable of practicing an elementary form of democracy, could direct their own learning and discipline themselves, and were able to thoughtfully control their behavior for the benefit of the group. She believed also that it was necessary to prepare the environment so that democracy would begin…

Discusses traditional preschool programming for the normal child, the emerging definition of normal childhood, some instances of positive educational change, the changing conceptions of women's roles, and how a preschool child's daily program today differs from that of the 1950s preschool day. (RK)

Author writes of young children in nursery school and the changes in their behavior during the school year. (Editor)

This study examined the decision-making processes of preschool teachers in creating developmentally appropriate practices. Five teachers of 4-year-old children in 3 private schools participated; these teachers' classrooms scored high on both the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale and the Classroom Practices Inventory. A model of preschool…

This collection of articles offers theories and thoughts presented at the 1998 Teaching for Intelligence Conference. They highlight a wide and diverse range of views on pedagogy, achievement, and the state of education. Section 1, "The Need for Intelligence in Schooling," includes "On the Habit of Informed Skepticism" (Theodore R. Sizer);…